Someone rightly said that “Information is power”. Even the big firms realise the importance of the business data to analyse the users’ behaviour to predict future business trends. Earlier we had seen huge firms like Uber suing Ola for creating fake accounts and OYO rooms suing ZO rooms for software theft. However, OYO rooms and ZO rooms finally decided to merge, thus ending the legal battle. In the most recent legal battle, Paytm has sued Unicommerce over extracting data of its users.
Unicommerce is Snapdeal owned eCommerce management firm and many Paytm users it for their business purposes. Unicommerce has completely denied all these accusations. The Delhi High Court has directed the company to pull off or modify its ads from YouTube carrying the Paytm logo. However, regarding the access to the business data derived from the sellers, the Hon’ble court said that there wasn’t any reason to change the status quo of Unicommerce accessing the seller data as a representative of the seller for the time being.
Commenting on the Court Orders, Unicommerce said that:
Reliefs sought (by Paytm) have not been granted. We welcome the honourable court’s interim order. While the matter is sub-judice, we believe that the allegations made are clearly unfounded and speculative.
In the meanwhile, Paytm has restricted all its sellers to use the Unicommerce platform for managing their business. It said in a post:
We discourage the use of Unicommerce! If we find any of our partners using Unicommerce services, we would take strict action including but not limited to imposing penalties or blocking the concerned partner entirely.
Unicommerce is a multi-channel order fulfilment platform through which various e-commerce merchants sell their products. The company was founded by Vibhu Garg, Karun Singla, Ankit Pruthi and Manish Gupta in 2012 and was later acquired by Snapdeal.
Companies use the data to study the user behaviour and thus predict future trends and plan accordingly. Thus, business data can severely impact a company’s growth and all of this legal ruckus between Paytm and Unicommerce revolves around this. Interestingly, both Paytm and Snapdeal are backed by the Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba.
The case is scheduled for rehearing in Delhi High Court on 11th July 2016. We’ll keep you posted wit the latest developments. Till then, stay tuned.